Sustainable Digitalization - A primer

DSI PhD Excellence Program Course 2023 - Day 1

Mario Angst

Course overview

Resources

Materials and slides are accessible at https://github.com/marioangst/susdigi_course

Online booklet with minimal content summaries/ further reading and complete sources:

https://marioangst.github.io/susdigi_course/

Lecturer

Mario Angst

Past: 🌊,🌲,🌾,⚡,(🛢) governance

Now: 🏙️ and 🖥️+🍀

Computational Social Science (mostly network analysis, NLP, Bayesian modeling)

Biased toward strong sustainability, bikes and local solutions.

Day 1 - Learning goals

  • The students can differentiate between sustainability as a normative concept and socio-technical sustainability transformations.

  • The students are aware of the three core sustainability strategies

  • The students are able to access current sustainability science literature.

Day 1 - Program

  • Introduction to the course
  • Input sustainability
  • Break
  • Input digitalization
  • Deep dive into sufficiency: Guest speaker Leonard Creutzburg
  • Sustainability in research and teaching at UZH: Guest speaker Jeannette Behringer

Day 2 - Program

  • Input sustainable digitalization
  • How does my research relate?
  • Build your own sus+digi project

Sustainability as a normative concept

Sustainability

We’ll count to two.

If you are one: Introduce yourself to your neighbour to the right. Discuss (in pairs) for 7 minutes:

What does sustainability mean to you?

Be prepared to introduce your neighbour and what sustainability means to them afterwards.

A key differentiation

  • Sustainability as a normative concept, including its discoursive contestation and imaginaries
  • Sustainability transformations as socio-technical change processes oriented toward sustainability

The Brundtland definition

Worth studying for a bit.

Take five minutes to read through this. This is the text ©️

Does anything surprise you? Discuss with your neighbor to the left (for ones) and be prepared to share your thoughts.

The Brundtland definition

intra- and intergenerational justice is front and center

but there were/ are many other sustainability definitions

Making sense of sustainability definitions

It all comes down to substitution of natural capital for future generations

  • weak sustainability: substitution is ok given function is retained and utility non-declining

  • strong sustainability: natural capital needs to be at least maintained

    • multi-functionality of biosphere
    • option space of future generations
    • precautionary principle

🤯 Beware of “nature” 🍃

What about the three pillars?

We don’t talk about the three pillars

Three core strategies

So sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. Behold the three strategies everyone should be aware of in order to reduce resource use:

  • efficiency
  • sufficiency
  • consistency

Strategy game

We’ll form four groups.

We will take ten minutes to gather as many examples of:

  • behaviours
  • policies
  • business models
  • research projects

you can associate with one of the four strategies.

Decoupling

… (economic) activity from resource use

  • single decoupling: green growth narrative, often efficiency only
  • double decoupling: efficiency + sufficiency

Sustainability imaginaries

Things become more sociological.

Futures of sustainability. “In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40):

  • Modernization
  • Transformation
  • Control

Modernization

weak sustainability, “green growth”

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Transformation

strong sustainability, post-growth, solidarity economy

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Control

resilience, inevitability and emergency

powerful entities solve crises with emergency powers

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

What is your imaginary?

Take a walk with your neighbour to the right (for ones). Be back in twelve minutes. Prepare to share your thoughts with the group.

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Modern sustainability science concepts

  • Planetary boundaries

  • Doughnut economics and post-growth

  • The Anthropocene

  • honorable mention: leverage points

Planetary boundaries

Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Persson et al 2022 and Steffen et al 2015

Doughnut economics

https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/

The Anthropocene

… questions everything.

nature-culture dichotomies

is there an “environment”?

Leverage points

How to intervene in complex systems?

Fischer and Riechers, p. 117

Sustainability transformations

Understanding the socio-technical change processes.

Sustainability transitions

How do radical changes happen in specific, large socio-technical systems?

Sustainability transitions

EEA 2019, based on Geels (2006)

Sustainability governance

  • Social-ecological systems perspective

  • Institutional navigation

SES

Ostrom 2014

Institutional navigation

Lubell and Morrison 2021, p. 665

The UN 2030 Agenda

  • Outcome of a political process
  • Anyone remember the Millenium Development Goals? The Agenda 21?
  • Conceptually weak, normatively… powerful? Evidence is mixed.

SDG research

  • Indicators
  • Local adaptation
  • SDG interactions

Break

15 minutes

Digitalization

For our purposes: Socio-technical consequences of digitization, the conversion of analogue streams of information into digital form

The discoursive construction of digitalization

Argument: What and how to digitize is always a decision, as well as regulation and non-regulation of its socio-technical consequences.

Why do we digitize? Let’s discuss.

For next week

Pick two of the reading materials referenced at any point in the online booklet accompanying the course at https://marioangst.github.io/susdigi_course/.

Read them and be prepare to share your thoughts on it.